Integrated Social Media Tracking Using Marketing Automation

Typically when you run a campaign you have to track social media clickthroughs and conversions separately from your email clickthroughs and conversions, because they are not launched in coordination with each other. Even if you use a URL shortener that allows you to track responses you will not see your results in with your other campaign results.

For example, if you are announcing a new product feature, you might send out an email to your customers, prospects, vendors and press about the new functionality. Since the links in these emails are all unique to the individual, you can see open rates, clickthroughs, and bounces, for everyone, or separate out for each of the recipient groups. Historically, if you wanted to send out a link in social media, you would take one of the URLs, shorten it, and then post it on the social media site, but the results were viewed separately, not in coordination with the other campaign targets. Instead, by following the steps below, you will see social media results with the other campaign recipients, and can compare the results with the other groups.

Include yourself in any campaign you want included in social media that has a link to your website or landing page. (Note: you may want to use a unique email like socialmedia@yourcompanyname.com that forwards to you to make it easier to remember and report on)

Promote the campaign in social media using the link, or a shortened version of the link from the email you receive when the campaign is launched. You can use any shortening service to do this and you will still get accurate results.

View the results of social media in your normal campaign reporting. Any clickthroughs or thought leadership downloads from the social media address can be contributed to social media marketing.

The clear benefit here is being able to see your results in conjunction with your other campaign results, instead of as a separate program tracked in another system. And you can use any free URL shortener to do this and you will still be successful. You can also do this for social media campaigns that are not being promoted to other segments in your list, and you can also track the results of any page on (or off) or your website as long as you follow the steps above.